(10 of 10)
In fact the Rockefeller commission delved into assassination plots against only two targets—Trujillo and Castro. Both probes were incomplete, but a commission member reported that no evidence was turned up that implicated any Presidents. In each case, he said, "it doesn't really track much higher than someone in the CIA saying that he thinks he talked to someone on the National Security Council staff, and the NSC people saying that they can't remember anything about it. The inference is that the CIA wouldn't have gone off on its own without direction from above, but it's only an inference." After the hearings are over and all of the evidence has been collected, the investigators must still find a solution to the difficult problem of how to prevent future CIA misdeeds without impairing the agency's ability to carry out its legitimate—and vital—foreign intelligence mission.
The U.S. obviously cannot afford to disband the CIA; it would simply have to be reinvented in another guise. For all the progress of détente, the world is still a dangerous place; other nations have industrious and aggressive secret services at work. Nonetheless, ways must be found to curb the CIA's excesses, to ensure that the agency operates in the nation's best interests. The Rockefeller commission dealt with one part of the problem: how to make certain that U.S. spies restrict their snooping to enemies abroad. The commission left to the Congress the equally important problem of how to prevent CIA excesses abroad, such as assassination plots and other flagrant abuses of American principles. Before those investigations have run their course, the debate may become far more intricate. For those issues are not bounded by clear rules of law but precepts of morality and, ultimately, the way the U.S. perceives its responsibilities as a civilized nation.